LIBERIA: Liberia's President, Mr Charles Taylor, has flown from Ghana's capital Accra to Liberia, hours after he was indicted for war crimes in nearby Sierra Leone to the embarrassment of the Ghanaian government.
Sierra Leone's UN-backed special court, which announced the indictment earlier yesterday, had served an arrest warrant on Ghanaian authorities and urged them to detain Mr Taylor and turn him over to the court.
Mr Taylor was in Ghana for the first day of peace talks with rebels who have been fighting to oust him since 2000.
"It's very bad. The president, and you monitoring his every movement," Mr Taylor told reporters, referring to himself, while leaving the terminal building.
He was indicted for backing rebels during Sierra Leone's long civil war in return for diamonds. The rebels, who attacked from Liberia in 1991, became notorious for hacking off civilians' limbs, mass rape and recruitment of child soldiers.
Ghana's Foreign Minister, Mr Nana Akufo-Addo, told reporters at the airport that Mr Taylor and his entourage were heading back to the capital, Monrovia, in a Ghanaian government plane.
"Obviously it's an embarrassing incident, but as far as I'm concerned the focus should not be on our embarrassment," Mr Akufo-Addo said. "I believe the action of the prosecutor in unsealing the indictment at this particular moment has not been helpful to the peace process."
He was not aware that a formal request had been made to Ghana seeking Mr Taylor's extradition.
Mr Samuel Jackson, Liberia's minister of state for economic and financial affairs, said the indictment of a sitting president smacked of interference in Liberian affairs by foreign powers and was "tantamount to a declaration of war". He added: "But we are on the path to peace and we will not give vent to our pugnacity."
Rumours that Mr Taylor had been arrested earlier in the day had plunged Monrovia into panic. Shops and banks closed, residents raced to schools to collect their children and soldiers spilled on to the streets.
"Can you imagine that we would invite someone to our country and then hand him over?" said one Ghanaian government official, who declined to be named. "[The prosecutor] David Crane was not thinking straight."